Promoting the Muse by Emily Veinglory

I love writing books, I even quite like editing them, I enjoying getting the cover art, and nothing makes me happier than hearing from readers. But promotion?  I was raised to think bragging just wasn’t very nice.  “Hey, here is my book, it’s great, buy it now.  Excuse me while I crawl under thus desk and die.”  New releases are easier.  You are just telling the people that your new book is out.  No big deal, right.  It is a book, and it is out.  You are just pointing to it and going: “Gee, look at that.”  It’s like talking about the weather.  Nice cover art, a chance of sexy scenes changing to an HEA later in the afternoon.

But some books rashly decided to become new releases when I was busy moving countries, changing jobs or, in the case of The Sculptor’s Muse (Loose Id), just being generally clueless.  So I kind of wanted to give this ebook another chance.  I wrote it almost three years ago and I have grown as a writer since then.  But I still feel this novella deserves a few more sales than it gets, near the bottom of my backlist.  The Sculptor’s Muse is about Clarius—a divine, but rather depressed, muse—a spirit of divine inspiration.  He is forbidden to reveal himself directly to any mortal, but Karl is in desperate need.  He is a painter who is struck suddenly blind buy a virus and left adrift in his own life and deserted by most of his friends.  Karl doesn’t need an abstract inspiration, he needs a lover.  But breaking the rules of the muses will have consequences….

So there you go.  I decided that this May I would try and give The Sculptor’s Muse a little extra push before my new releases start coming out.  In June Father of Dragons (Samhain) comes out in print, in July Wolfkin (also Samhain) is released as an ebook.  But dragons and werewolves seem to be an easy sell to the romance reading public.  May is for muses.  Or at least I hope it is.  My attempts to get some free online promo going can be seen on my blog [http://www.veinglory.com/blog.html] and we will see if it had any effect on sales when the royalty statement for May arrives (I will be sure to let everyone know). 

I’m hoping for 20 extra sales as a result of my efforts.  But even if I don’t make that goal I hope to overcome some of my fear of self-promotion.  It comes down to having some faith that there are actually a few people out there that want to know about my book and are more than happy to be told about it.  Because if the book doesn’t create that kind of response in readers no amount of promotion is going to save it!